Blow (13 page)

The first part of the operation went smoothly enough. George landed okay in Guaymas, okay again at the airport and on the landing strip at the point, where he took on the four hundred kilos of marijuana. On the trip back, however, heavier by nearly half a ton and coming in to gas up at Guaymas, he suffered a little equilibrium problem, wherein the plane went into what is called a “tipping and touching” mode—hitting first on one wheel, then the other, careening down the landing strip like a drunk after closing time. He managed to straighten it out before one of the wings actually scraped the ground, loaded up with more fuel, and at 3:00
P.M
. took off for the border on the final leg of his journey. After Guaymas, he planned to head up the middle of the Gulf of California, cross the border directly over the city of Mexicali, then change course slightly, heading a couple of points west of due north so as to graze the eastern edge of the Salton Sea, which would be easy to spot in the desert. About halfway up alongside the sea, he'd head northeast over the Chocolate Mountains, toward the pass between the Orocopia Mountains and the Chuckwallas, go right up the slot to the Colorado River aqueduct, follow that along as it wound to the northeast, then look for Granite Pass between the Granite and Iron mountain ranges, which opens right onto the bed of Danby Dry Lake. To spot the lakes, one looked for the whitest and brightest splashes on the desert floor. These marked the salt concentrations that made a hard surface for smooth landing. He'd been warned to stay clear of the darker brown areas at the edge of the lakes, possibly muddy ground that could grab the wheels and flip the plane into a somersault. Danby Dry Lake measured about ten miles long and two and a half miles wide and was identifiable by the slight bend to its shape, looking something like a boiled hot dog. Driving out there from Manhattan Beach, Pogo would figure out where the wind was blowing from and park his truck at a point upwind of a stretch long enough to give George at least three thousand feet of landing room. After the transfer, while Pogo headed back to Manhattan Beach, George would take off a final time and return the plane to the Santa Monica Airport. That was the plan.

George found Mexicali easily enough—only it turned out to be Tijuana. Or San Diego. Some damn place, but definitely not Mexicali, because that was the Pacific Ocean out there, and according to the chart Mexicali wasn't on any fucking ocean. This meant that through some bit of miscalculation or inattention he'd gotten off course, at least a hundred miles west and who knew how many miles north of where he was supposed to be.

Abruptly he banked to the right and headed due east, to the vicinity of the Salton Sea, to try to get himself oriented. After an hour's flying he found the sea, but then experienced more confusion looking for the right mountains to line up with and the pass he had to go through. One mountain seemed just like the next, all of them a mottled brown color with scrubby growth, like a three-day beard. Flying only at thirty-five hundred feet, he was running into a discouraging amount of turbulence, made worse by the wide wing configuration of the Cherokee. The plane bucked and heaved, buffeted by rising currents of hot air welling up off the desert floor, hitting a ridge line and tumbling down the other side. “I was bobbing up and down like a goddamn cork on the water up there, plus I really had no fucking idea where I was.” He could see dry lake beds all over, gleaming white against the red rock of the hills. But which one was Danby? Where was the Colorado aqueduct, and the pass?

It was now getting late, the sun slipping fast toward the Sierra Nevada. Once it slid behind that mountain wall, it would be as if someone had pulled down a giant window shade. Sun would still be shining down on the beach bunnies back at Manhattan Beach, but east of the Sierra it would soon be as dark as a malefactor's heart. “I remember following the ridge of mountains, following it along, there'd be four or five passes, and I'd take one, and, Jesus Christ, I hoped this was the right one. I'd lost a lot of time getting off course. What scared me most was still being up there after the sun went down, because then it was all over. I was running low on gas. I'd end up crash-landing, or plowing into the side of some mountain I couldn't see. In that plane I discovered what it was like being in a state of total fear—all the things I didn't know how to do. I thought, ‘George, you stupid son of a bitch, here's where you're finally going to get yourself killed.'”

Finally, coming down through a pass, jagged mountains on both sides, he saw another patch of white, another dry lake bed, this one long and narrow with a slow curve. It looked about right. There was a set of salt evaporators up at the north end—that seemed right—and, by fucking Christ, there was Pogo down there, his truck sitting up near the top of the lake, flashing his headlights on and off and on and off, a big piece of something white waving from the aerial to show which way the wind was blowing. George banked right, then left to get downwind, and lost most of the memory of what happened next, except that suddenly he felt one of the landing gears touch down, then the other, both of them now, and he was taxiing up toward the truck, with Pogo outside the vehicle punching both fists into the air in triumph. “I'll never forget what it was like finally getting on the ground, the whole trip—it was a dream I had had for all those years. I'd said, ‘I'm going to do this.' And I actually did it. I'd never felt anything like that in my life.” Simultaneously, George had another thought, one that moved him so strongly he uttered it out loud to himself: “I am never, ever going to do this shit again.”

*   *   *

Early in 1969, after that first trip from Mexico to Massachusetts, the whole crew—Annette and the two Wendys, Frank and Sam and George, and also the pilot, Greg, who George determined would now handle the flights into the dry lake beds—decided to pick up and move the operation down to Puerto Vallarta, so they could run the business from the source. On the beach about a mile north of town they found a large white villa to rent, with rooms enough for everyone. It came with a cook and a gatekeeper to watch out for strangers. Hotel construction was going on to the north, but between the house and town was nothing but empty beach lined with coconut palms, and a view across the bay to the misty mountains of Punta de Mita. Every five or six weeks now Greg would land the plane there, then take off with another load for the happy students of Amherst.

Life for the inhabitants of the villa assumed the qualities of an endless holiday. Mexican boys came by every morning to bring them fresh oysters, which they laced with
salsa picante
and combined with whatever the cook was preparing for breakfast, which they ate out on a balcony, watching waves breaking along the sand. An endless procession of pelicans drifted by, gliding just an inch or two above the water, supported on a cushion of warm and humid air. Occasionally one would climb to about fifty feet, then do an acute right turn and crash into the ocean with a great splash and racket to grab a fish. Later in the morning, more Mexican boys would come along, leading horses for a ride up the beach, or they would land with catamarans to take George and his friends out for a sail.

The women grew especially fond of Pedro, the gatekeeper; they introduced the old man to smoking pot and provided him a pair of binoculars to look through after he got stoned. Another old guy, Wally the Human Fly, age seventy, lived a couple of villas down the beach. During his working days back in Chicago, Wally could attract quite a crowd when he'd dress up in his cape and tights and scamper up and down the sides of skyscrapers off Michigan Avenue. Now the women would fly a white towel off the balcony to signal that it was okay for Wally to sneak out on his wife and come over and drink tequila, while Pedro smoked dope and stared out at the ocean through 8 × 50 magnification, the pelicans winging by. Toward the end of the afternoon, George would leave the villa to put in an appearance at the Oceana Bar, where Liz and Richard and other movie people held forth. He befriended the screenwriter James Poe, whose film
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
had just come out. Poe had recently been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, and his doctor had given him six months to live if he didn't stop drinking. To take his mind off booze, George drove him out to the mahogany forests north of town, where they ate magic mushrooms George had gotten from the Indians, observing how the mahogany trees would entwine their branches around one another as if grappling in some arboreal orgy. When they came back to town, Poe told George he'd like to do that over again—it was more fun than Scotch and a lot better for his liver.

It was getting well into the summer of 1969, the summer Mary Jo Kopechne went off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, Charles Manson's followers went on a murder spree in Beverly Hills, and a huge rock concert was held in a farmer's field twelve miles northwest of Woodstock, New York. George was in the midst of a pot trip, but Sam the Bartender attended Woodstock in bandito mustache, Mexican sombrero, and a shawl. He took a load of their dope along, set up a pot stand in the mud and the rain, and sold out.

On one trip, George, Annette, and Orlando and his girlfriend took a detour off Route 90 and stopped in Greenwood, Indiana, just outside Indianapolis, to see George's sister and brother-in-law, Marie and Otis. The couple now had a little baby, Steven, destined for law school. They lived in a two-story white house in a new subdivision, Otis beginning his rise as a research chemist at Eli Lilly & Co. During supper, Otis and Marie seemed glad enough to see George, but Orlando struck them as a little weird, with his orange-rimmed sunglasses, Jimi Hendrix Afro, and Fu Manchu mustache. “What are you doing with that freak?” Otis asked, taking George aside. After dinner George asked if they'd like to try some marijuana; everyone's doing it, he said. They happened to have some out in the Winnebago. Marie had never smoked pot but said that some of their friends had tried it. She took a few puffs when they passed it around, only to be polite, it seemed to George. Otis also gave it a try, but it made him feel sick and he disappeared suddenly into the bathroom. That night the gang stayed in the Winnebago and the next day they went on their way.

When George got to Amherst, he left the camper there, and he and Annette rented a car and drove down to Weymouth to see his parents. It was his first visit in about two years. His father asked him how the pile-driving business was, and George said it was coming along pretty well. And the classes at Long Beach City College? Well, actually, he was putting off the college thing for a while, George said, to see if he could earn a little money. George took everyone out for steak and broiled lobster at the Red Coach Grill in Hingham, where his parents liked to go for Sunday dinners. His father seemed not a little taken with Annette, dressed demurely now in a shirt dress but still causing a few heads to turn at the Red Coach Grill. He called her Darlin' and Honey and made over her during dinner. Annette brought out snapshots of the villa on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, of George and the guys standing in their bathing suits under the palm trees, of their Mexican friend Ramón, his hair in a long braid. It was a great place to spend a vacation, she told the Jungs.

*   *   *

In the early 1970s the pot business changed dramatically, as marijuana started arriving in the United States from other countries besides Mexico. The increase in supply created more competition among the dealers. Quality and price began to count. People became much more knowledgeable, and the market changed from one where the seller controlled the action to where the buyer was now king; there was a lot more scrambling around for customers now.

One of the major causes of this change, according to Michael Armstrong, a drug historian who at the time headed an organization called LEMAR, for Legalize Marijuana, was President Richard Nixon's Operation Intercept. Put into effect during the summer and fall of 1969, the program was designed both to reduce pot smuggling out of Mexico and to goad the Mexican government into adopting a more aggressive stance against the trade, even to get the Mexican army involved. It was inaugurated with a total sealing-off of the U.S. border at San Ysidro, just north of Tijuana. Customs officials stopped and searched every single vehicle going through. This produced miles of jammed traffic and a great amount of disruption on the Mexican side. The U.S. Border Patrol also embedded military-style sensors in the ground all along the southwestern border to try to detect crossings at places other than official checkpoints. Operation Intercept didn't seize pot so much as it began discouraging land-based smuggling operations. People were now going by sea and taking to the air, as George had been doing all along. But for a while the crackdown resulted in a dearth of Mexican pot, which motivated wholesalers to seek loads from elsewhere. Thai stick came heavily on the market from Thailand, as did Colombian Gold and Santa Marta Red from Colombia, Panama Red from Panama, and the dark, powerful, resinous Ganja from Jamaica.

Earl the Pearl, who had moved into big-time wholesaling, with dozens of customers on one side and smugglers on the other, soon had his business perking along like a little supermarket. Methodical, well organized, and meticulous, he had moved his operation out of Manhattan Beach to a Victorian house overlooking Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco, where he provided buyers with samples of fifteen to twenty varieties, all labeled and graded according to quality and price. Customers came in, tried them out, then placed an order. The increase in competition meant that suppliers like George no longer called all the shots. They had to develop marketing skills. “Now sometimes, you'd come in with a load, but someone else might come in with a better load, better-quality stuff,” says George. “Earl would say he'd still do your load, but the other stuff was going first, customers wanted that pot more than your pot. So you had to wait around. Or you might decide not to wait and take it East. The West Coast was becoming like a Kmart for drugs. There was so much of it that it had to be pretty special stuff to move fast. In the East they weren't that particular.” Even there, George felt he had to give his customers something different to maintain his market share. In the tourist shops in Puerto Vallarta he bought strings of tiny blue beads and sprinkled them among his kilos, telling the wholesalers in Amherst to get out the word that this stuff came straight from the Indians, had the beads in it from their secret rituals and shit. Soon he was overhearing students at the bar in the Lord Jeff raving on about this special Yaqui Indian pot, the stuff with the beads. Dynamite grass.